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Review of another poetry collection
May. 26th, 2008 04:12 pmOn the Back of the Wind by Frank Dullaghan, Cinnamon Press 2008
Though this is a first full-length collection, Dullaghan has been writing some years, and holding down a career as a City lawyer, besides being a husband and father. So his poems are not those of some twenty-something with a burning desire to look clever and little actual experience to write about. They are more mature and polished than your average first collection, and cover a wider range of subject matter than most, but at the core of the collection is a number of poems about the fraught relationship between a boy, later a man, and his father. These are very moving, but that alone wouldn't validate them; what does that is their inventiveness of thought and language, and their eye and ear for telling detail.I don't think anything is more useful in a review than quoting, so here's "How It Could Happen" in full:
HOW IT COULD HAPPEN
It could be an evening like this,
turning away from a mirror,
the garden moving closer to the house,
the lights not yet lit,
that the corner of my eye will catch him
glancing at me from the glass
before slipping aside, gone
when I step back in front.
Or perhaps early,
the sun not up, I'll be in the kitchen
filling a cup at the tap
when the room will momentarily darken
and I'll sense a shape at the door
till I turn and the room brightens,
the sky lying against the door glass,
blond, blazon, the morning risen.
But I'll know he's been there,
trying to find a new language
of light and shade, some way to bridge the gap,
leave some message,
or maybe just to reach out,
the way the wind might move through a room
to turn the pages of a book,
brush the sleeves of a coat in the hall.
This is how it could happen.
This way or some other.
The delicacy and subtlety of this is very striking: the unstated pun in "the sun not up", the observation in "the garden moving closer to the house", the quiet, throwaway tone of the last two lines, that leave one unsure whether the poem ends in hope or negation. This poem is one of the stars of the collection, but its tone and method are not untypical of the book as a whole.
Though this is a first full-length collection, Dullaghan has been writing some years, and holding down a career as a City lawyer, besides being a husband and father. So his poems are not those of some twenty-something with a burning desire to look clever and little actual experience to write about. They are more mature and polished than your average first collection, and cover a wider range of subject matter than most, but at the core of the collection is a number of poems about the fraught relationship between a boy, later a man, and his father. These are very moving, but that alone wouldn't validate them; what does that is their inventiveness of thought and language, and their eye and ear for telling detail.I don't think anything is more useful in a review than quoting, so here's "How It Could Happen" in full:
HOW IT COULD HAPPEN
It could be an evening like this,
turning away from a mirror,
the garden moving closer to the house,
the lights not yet lit,
that the corner of my eye will catch him
glancing at me from the glass
before slipping aside, gone
when I step back in front.
Or perhaps early,
the sun not up, I'll be in the kitchen
filling a cup at the tap
when the room will momentarily darken
and I'll sense a shape at the door
till I turn and the room brightens,
the sky lying against the door glass,
blond, blazon, the morning risen.
But I'll know he's been there,
trying to find a new language
of light and shade, some way to bridge the gap,
leave some message,
or maybe just to reach out,
the way the wind might move through a room
to turn the pages of a book,
brush the sleeves of a coat in the hall.
This is how it could happen.
This way or some other.
The delicacy and subtlety of this is very striking: the unstated pun in "the sun not up", the observation in "the garden moving closer to the house", the quiet, throwaway tone of the last two lines, that leave one unsure whether the poem ends in hope or negation. This poem is one of the stars of the collection, but its tone and method are not untypical of the book as a whole.
